"Indie" Author...or Self-Published Author?

Early this morning before I started working on a new series, I checked out a few bloggers I like to follow on a daily basis and found an interesting post. The title of the post suggested I was going to be reading about "Indie" authors. I've been published by small presses myself many times. I love "Indie" publishers and "Indie" authors and look forward to reading anything about them.

The blog post I'm talking about was a guest post on a publishing blog I frequent often. The regular author of the blog wrote a short introduction paragraph and I decided to skip it and move right into the guest blogger's post to save time.

But I'd say about a quarter of the way into the guest post I stopped reading because things weren't making sense. The author was talking about editing costs, cover artist costs, and a list of other expenses I didn't expect to find in a blog post about "Indie" authors.

Then I started to wonder if I'd missed a few changes...whether or not it's become common practice for "Indie" publishers to now charge authors fees. I've always been a little fanatical about this. The way publishing has always worked is that the publisher pays the author, with either an advance, a flat fee, or royalties. I've never paid a publisher a single cent to have any of my work published. I've never paid a literary agent a reading fee. For me, paying a publisher or paying a literary agent is an automatic red flag. And I stay far away from those types because I don't think they are ethical.

I've been around for almost twenty years and I've seen a lot. I know for a fact there's one small press out there that charges authors editing fees, and there have been literary agents charging reading fees since the beginning of time.

But as I continued to read this blog post something wasn't right. The author of the post continued referring to herself as an "Indie" author, only it sounded more like she was talking about her experience as a self-published author.

So I went back and checked the blog owner's introduction, which I should have done in the first place. And sure enough, the blog owner introduced the guest blogger as a self-published author, not an "Indie" author. And the post was about self-publishing, not small presses.

I've always been a staunch supporter of self-published authors. I admire them and I've supported a few right here on my blog. But as far as I've always known...and like I said I've been around for a long time..."Indie" publishers are considered small presses. And the distinction has always been crystal clear.

At first I thought maybe the guest blogger was so new she was using a term she shouldn't have been using. But then I read the comment thread and found that I wasn't the only one confused, especially with the title of the post. Others thought it was misleading, too. I found this on wiki. But the biggest surprise of all was that for every comment that said the guest blogger was misleading the readers, there was another comment defending the use of "Indie" when referring to a self-published author.

So I learned something knew today. Evidently, "Indie" is now being used to refer to self-published authors as well as small presses.

I'm not commenting with my opinion at all. I don't think it makes a huge difference in the grand scheme for anyone. It might even catch on and become common practice. But I will say this. If I ever decide to self-publish anything (and I've thought about self-publishing very seriously in the past year), I'm going to proudly call myself a self-published author, not an "Indie" author. If I'm going to spend my hard earned money publishing my own book, I want full credit as a proud self-published author and I don't want anyone thinking I was published by a small press. I also don't want to mislead anyone either.